Publish your work on terms that hold
Free for individuals, nonprofits, schools and government at any size, and for every company under $20,000,000 a year.
# ORL 2.3 is the licence for source code
curl -o LICENSE https:/# writes the full licence text to LICENSE in your repo
Free at or below the threshold. No account, no signup.
Four instruments, one set of terms. Code, data, model weights and agent skills, each licensed as what it actually is.
A badge states the licence. The seal is earned: it is issued only after the file in your repository is read and hashed, and it is re-checked every day. Get one for a repository you own.
What happens after you copy that command
One licence for each kind of work. Use the tabs on the box above. If you wrote software, pick Code.
It costs you nothing while the company using it earns under $20,000,000 a year. Above that they pay 0.5 percent of the amount above it, not of the whole, and never more than $250,000 a year.
A published version is never edited. Corrections ship as a new version and the old text stays reachable at its canonical URL permanently.
Why now
The fastest-growing thing in software has no licence written for it.
Agent skills, system prompts, tool definitions and protocol servers are being published this year in volumes nobody planned for. The reference collection of Model Context Protocol servers is close to ninety thousand stars. The SDKs behind it run near half a billion downloads a month. Almost none of that work carries a licence written for what it actually is.
A prompt is not source code. A model weight is not a dataset. Licences drafted for 1998 software are being stretched over artifacts they have no vocabulary for, and the gap gets settled later by whoever brings the better lawyer. ORA exists so the person who wrote the skill is the one who sets the terms, while it is still their call to make.
Agent work today
MIT, or nothing
Packaged agent expertise ships under a licence with no words for it, or under no licence at all.
What ORA adds
Terms that fit
Skills, prompts, tool definitions, workflow templates and protocol servers, named as what they are.
What it costs you
Nothing to start
Free for people, nonprofits, schools, government, and every company under twenty million in revenue.
How these licences get written.
Once a licence is published the words never change. If something needs fixing it goes out as a new version and the old one stays online at its own address forever. A lawyer has not reviewed these yet, and the six questions counsel would ask are printed next to the text so you can see exactly where the soft ground is.
- 01
Drafting
A licence is written against named, sourced failures rather than principles. Every clause has to point at something that already went wrong in public.
- 02
Internal adversarial review
The draft is attacked from four positions before publication: adopter, commercial licensee, maintainer, and hostile sceptic. This is structured review, not external legal counsel.
- 03Now
Publication
The text is published with a digest and its unanswered legal questions. Publication freezes the bytes; it does not imply counsel approval or remove the disclosed legal risk.
- 04
Public review
Comments, objections, and steward responses are recorded against the published version. An accepted correction can only appear in a new numbered version.
- 05
External counsel
External legal review remains outstanding. If counsel identifies a defect, the published text stays frozen and the correction ships as a later version.
Adoption
Answer four questions and get your licence.
What did you make, who will be using it, how much do they earn, and will anyone train a model on it. Answer those four and you get the exact licence, what it costs, and the notice to paste into your README.
The notice states your terms. To prove the file is really there, issue a certificate from the dashboard once it is committed.
Why this is a configurator. Every other licence project makes you read a comparison table and guess. The answer depends on three facts about you, so we ask for the three facts.
OpenRoots License
no fee, no reporting
Royalty-free, with the shared conditions
no model is being trained
Reading it as a human never triggers this.
Term
Permanent
The version you attach governs this release for as long as it exists.
Your notice
Licensed under the OpenRoots License 2.3 (ORL 2.3). The version above is the version that governs, permanently. It is never edited, and no later version applies to this release unless the licensor adopts it. Full text: openroots.org/licenses/orl/2.3 AI training on this work requires a separate Compute licence. Selling, sublicensing, redistributing, porting, repackaging, or hosting this work as a competing product requires a separate written agreement.
You can
- Use it for anything, including making money
- Read, modify, and fork it
- Ship it inside your own product
- Redistribute it, modified or not
You must
- Keep the notice, licence, and version on every copy
- Pay the Canopy royalty above the revenue threshold
- Get a Compute licence before training any model on it
- Disclose AI assistance on contributions and bug reports
You cannot
- Sell, sublicense, redistribute, port, repackage, or host it as a competing product
- Train a model on it without the Compute licence
- Use the author's trademarks beyond honest attribution
- Sue over patents and keep your patent rights
Provenance
Every clause traces to a fight somebody already lost.
Nothing in these instruments is drafted from principle. Each one exists because a specific thing happened in public, with receipts, and no existing licence prevented it.
- 01
Delayed-open licences hand the work over on a timer
Several source-available licences promise the work turns permissive after a fixed period, which means the protection has an expiry date written into it from the first day. Section 7 gives the opposite. The terms you publish under are the terms that hold, for as long as that release exists.
Terms that do not expire
ORL 1.1, Section 7
- 02
Unity charged per install
Developers revolted in 2023. The chief executive was gone in two weeks. The fee was dead within a year. An unpredictable metered price reads as betrayal even when the underlying idea is reasonable.
Flat capped royalty
ORL 1.1, Section 5
- 03
A paying customer got five hours to pay more
WP Engine licensed the WordPress trademark, then received a multimillion dollar ultimatum and lost infrastructure access when it went unpaid. A trademark claim turned into a weapon against a customer already paying.
Irrevocable fair use
ORL 1.1, Section 11.2
- 04
Attribution may not survive the training pipeline
Litigation over code-generation systems alleges that licensed code entered training while required notices did not reliably reach output. Most established general-purpose software licences do not classify training as a distinct act.
The Compute licence
ORL 1.1, Section 6
- 05
SSPL tried to close the hole and closed too much
Debian, Red Hat, and Fedora all rejected it. Its definition of a competing offering swallowed an adopter's entire unrelated stack, so ordinary users paid for a clause aimed at hyperscalers.
Narrow substitute test
ORL 1.1, Sections 1.13 and 4
- 06
Open weights are not open source
Weights are routinely shipped under custom terms carrying user thresholds, regional exclusions, and bans on training from their own outputs, while being described as open. ORM states its terms plainly and puts the training question in one place.
The model licence
ORM 1.1